Samsung effectively kicked off the second wave of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs when it released the 980 Pro back in September last year. While other drives have come along and claimed the performance crown since its launch (such as the WD_Black SN850), it's still a good drive for anyone looking at performance first and foremost. Including anyone that has a Sony PlayStation 5 and is looking to bolster the internal drive space.
At least, it is if you buy a third-party cooler at the same time; the drive itself doesn't come with one. This generally isn't a problem on PCs, as motherboards tend to come with some form of cooling for NVMe SSDs. It's more of an issue for the PS5—the specs for the SSD drive bay for Sony's console requires that some form of cooling is required.
That has now changed though, as Samsung has released a new version of the drive that comes with a heatsink. It's not bad looking either, although it will spend its life hidden out of sight for the vast majority of users.
The new version of the drive is called the Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink, in case you're looking for it. Only the 1TB and 2TB models are available with the heatsink, with the price going up by $20 for the privilege—which is generally what you can expect to pay for a lump of metal on top of your drive. That places the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB at $249 and the 2TB drive at $449.
Samsung's 980 Pro has been on sale for most of the year, with the 2TB model (without heatsink) down to $360, that's $70 less than its MSRP. It'll be interesting to see if the heatsink models enjoy such savings.
